Year: 2011

The recession has hit everybody really hard…

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I think the Pakistan bit at the end is in poor taste but especially loved the one above it.

My neighbor got a pre-declined credit card in the mail.

CEO’s are now playing miniature golf.

Exxon-Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.

A stripper was killed when her audience showered her with rolls of pennies while she danced.

I saw a Mormon with only one wife.

If the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

McDonald’s is selling the 1/4 ouncer.

Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America.

Parents in Beverly Hills fired their nannies and learned their
children’s names.

A truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico ..

A picture is now only worth 200 words.

When Bill and Hillary travel together, they now have to share a room.

The Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas is now managed by Somali pirates.

Congress says they are looking into this Bernard Madoff scandal.

Oh Great! The guy who made $50 Billion disappear is being investigated by the people who made $1.5 Trillion disappear!

And, finally….

I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline. I got a call center in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited, and asked if I could drive a truck.

Source—Stocky Stan @ 94.9 The Bull; Read more: http://www.949thebull.com/pages/stockystan.html#ixzz1LVy1Y88G

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I reckon going by historical critique, my opinions would differ but I think I may have finally figured out how to give my mother a smile towards Mother’s day.

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Last night ma went kind of on red alert when she noticed someone climbing up a ladder outside her window; me of course, why would I worry? If they’re smart enough to use a ladder they’re not stupid and if they break the window, well, you shout at them to be more careful next time… heh. It was far past time for sleeping that short of seeing a TV lowering out the window, little to worry about in my books.

In my shift from tired mode to quick-computate mode, things obviously suggested thief, or someone sneaking in without the parents knowledge. Seeing a young arm hanging out a window, holding a pink ribbon tied to the ladder and trying to ‘remotely’ hide it on the other hand, would suggest the latter to me. So of course, ma had me look up the non emergency number for the local police, which conveniently has an outpost like 2 minutes up the road from here. Sure enough, 17-year old whose probably going to have upset parents.

Nothing like being out in the cold with like four cops poking around to get you wide awake again. *Groans*

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The best part about being a penny pinching S.O.B. is when you make a budget that’s designed around being bled like a stuffed pig, unless the car halts and catches fire, the fact is that the reality can’t be toooo terrible when the graph is so good.

How? Driving ~30km per day at a rate of approximately 450km to every 45 litres, seriously beats the ****ing hell out of driving near ~225km per day and using around 38 litres for the same general distance covered.

And my budget for the next month or so is built around the assumption that petrol will cost me around $4.15 a gal, or roughly $1.09 a litre. That’s about a $0.25 higher per hal then it is now.

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Note, I am not psychotic but this is strangely, eh, this has a nice tune is all I will say lol. It’s also somewhat morbid and disturbing but, helps if you have an equally insane sense of humour.

Before the story begins, is it such a sin
For me to take what’s mine until the end of time?
We were more than friends before the story ends
And I will take what’s mine, create what God would never design

Our love had been so strong for far too long
I was weak with fear that something would go wrong
Before the possibilities came true I took all possibility from you
Almost laughed myself to tears, conjuring her deepest fears

Must have stabbed her fifty fucking times
I can’t believe it
Ripped her heart out right before her eyes
Eyes over easy, eat it, eat it, eat it

She was never this good in bed even when she was sleeping
Now she’s just so perfect, I’ve never been quite so fucking deep in
It goes on and on, and on, I can keep you looking young
And preserved forever with a fountain to spray on your youth whenever

‘Cause I really always knew that my little crime
Would be cold that’s why I got a heater for your thighs
And I know, I know it’s not your time but bye, bye
And a word to the wise when the fire dies
You think it’s over but it’s just begun, baby don’t cry

You had my heart, at least for the most part
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime
We fell apart, let’s make a new start
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime, but baby, don’t cry

Now possibilities I’d never considered
Are occurring the likes of which I’d never heard
Now an angry soul comes back from beyond the grave
To repossess a body with which I’d misbehaved

Smiling right from ear to ear
Almost laughed herself to tears

Must have stabbed him fifty fucking times
I can’t believe it
Ripped his heart out right before his eyes
Eyes over easy, eat it, eat it, eat it

Now that it’s done, I realize the error of my ways
I must venture back to apologize
From somewhere far beyond the grave

I gotta make up for what I’ve done
‘Cause I was all up in a piece of heaven
While you burned in hell, no peace forever

‘Cause I really always knew that my little crime
Would be cold that’s why I got a heater for your thighs
And I know, I know it’s not your time but bye, bye
And a word to the wise when the fire dies
You think it’s over but it’s just begun but baby, don’t cry

You had my heart at least for the most part
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime
We fell apart, let’s make a new start
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime, but baby, don’t cry

I will suffer for so long
(What will you do, not long enough’)
To make it up to you
(I pray to God that you do)
I’ll do whatever you want me to do
(Well then I’ll break you unchained)

And if it’s not enough
(If it’s not enough, if it’s not enough)
If it’s not enough
(Not enough)
Try again
(Try again)
And again
(And again)
Over and over again

We’re coming back, coming back
We’ll live forever, live forever
Let’s have a wedding, have a wedding
Let’s start the killing, start the killing

‘Cause I really always knew that my little crime
Would be cold that’s why I got a heater for your thighs
And I know, I know it’s not your time but bye, bye
And a word to the wise when the fire dies
You think it’s over but it’s just begun but baby, don’t cry

You had my heart at least for the most part
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime
We fell apart, let’s make a new start
‘Cause everybody’s gotta die sometime, but baby, don’t cry

A Little Piece Of Heaven—Avenged Sevenfold

Using a custom window manager with Gnome / Ubuntu 11.04

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I kinda expected that the upgrade to Natty Narwhal would be a bit bumpy, but it was pretty painless. Really all I use GNOME for is a way to get a system tray into my XMonad session with the least possible fuss. I also use a few GTK+Gnome oriented apps like evince and geeqie but have no real connexion to the old Gnome.

The only real bump that I have faced, is that overriding WINDOW_MANAGER and calling gnome-session is no longer enough to run GNOME with XMonad. Ubuntu 11.04 as of current update status, is overwriting this with compiz! Not even overriding the gconf key helps, it just gets reset to gnome-wm; which is what is *supposed* to be picking up the exported WINDOW_MANAGER variable from my X session file.

Solution? Found a helpful hint on the XMonad wiki. However rather than modify things at the system level (I am a BSD lover after all), I opted to instead setup a session file in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gnome-session/sessions/$LOGNAME.session. The default value for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is ~/.config, $LOGNAME is another variable for $USER (your users’ login name).


[ terry@alice ]$ cat ~/.config/gnome-session/sessions/terry.session
[GNOME Session]
Name=Classic GNOME
Required=windowmanager;panel;filemanager;
Required-windowmanager=gnome-wm
Required-panel=gnome-panel
Required-filemanager=nautilus
DefaultApps=gnome-settings-daemon;
[ terry@alice ]$

Then updated my X session to run this with commit 3e92fc91040573ba40ac20ad75a594d6eeef60b6. And for good measure, I unset the gconf key.

Now everything worky 🙂

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Haven’t had much tie to update my journal lately, kinda had more important things on my mind when I’m off work. At work, well, most of my time of late has been spent working on a project that’s shared between the two principal developent groups. Work related stuff, usually filters through to private notes or the companies internal stuff. That’s my policy at least.

If we could move the table out and bring in a cot and my PC, I’d probably never leave work, except to use the shower lol.

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Last night was some awesome rounds on Killing Floor, which eventually became an effective 2 versus like upwards of several dozen zombies at a time: including the dreaded Fleshpound, which is basically the run for your damn life if you don’t want to lose it, kind of Big Mother of all Big Ass Zombies! A single fleshpound can easily neutralize an entire section if it catches them in an unwary crowd, and usually you find them in pairs with plenty of support!

We had some very close games but also some impressive successes against the Fleshpounds and their accompanying chainsaw wielding cousins. My teammate was running level 4 berserker with a katana, while I was running as a level 4 field medic, armed with a MP7 and DE.50. Perhaps between surviving the hordes of lesser zombies, we got into the grove by the time the big nasties entered the fray.

It was like a well choreographed dance that just came together on the fly: berserker tanking in with her katanta and my MP7s healing darts and medical syringe for help; then Ran’ would fade out to heal and I’d step in as a human shield and in between whomever not dealing with the fleshpounder, picking off the lesser zombies. Between the two of us, we basically kicked major zombie ass, lol. It was kind of impressive  to see such teamwork, because normally, two players are gonna be dead meat in a game like Killing Floor, not mopping the floor. Although of course, more than a few onslaughts we only escaped by like 3-5 points of health left… hehe. At least for me, it’s a pretty natural flow: heal my friend to starve off death, then slip in front as the fleshpound charges, then cycling back before I’m dead, lol.

Somehow, it’s part of how I am wired up, that I’d rather be support instead of the highest score. In real life, well, all I can say, the zombies would have to eat my friends over my dead and gnawed body. That point of view wouldn’t surprise most of the people that know me either.

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Aside from being grumpy that the company I work for, takes Good Friday as a company holiday :'(, I’ve been somewhat busy today. My mother wanted to visit a Catholic church some miles down the highway, so I took her up there, she didn’t like it of course, but trying to please my mother isn’t quite trivial for anything, let along the Roman Catholics.

After that, it was essentially off to the nearest Publix supermarket to appease her shopping list a bit. Even though I’m not at work, I couldn’t help but notice a type error when walking down the isles. Ma wanted to grab a box of matzah, bottle of soy sauce, etc. So they’ve got the “Mexican” food, they’ve “Asian”, which is vaguely ethnic but convenient, “West Indies” which is more geographic then ethnical, but what really made my brain reach up and say “Compiler error: type association invalid”, is when I saw at the end of the isle, the sign marked “Kosher”. To top it off, the directory labels the isle as ethnic foods and the sign marks it as Hispanic foods. Yeah, I’m a pain in the ass.

The word Kosher, essentially refers to a discipline: if we go by one of my favourite resources from Princeton University, semantically it means food that obeys the jewish food law. It’s not an ethnic group. I.e. you may have a Mexican that eats kosher food in the west indies but you are unlikely to meat a someone of the Mexican-Kosher ethnicity from the west indies ^_^. O.K. so sue me, I’m stuck driving my mother around instead of being at work, the marbles ain’t going to shift out of programmer mode that easily. Besides, that kind of branch of math is very relevant to my work.

What I really would like to know however, is in what kind of type model that also makes sense, does fish != a meat. But eh, I’ve been wondering about that one for most of my life.

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Well, it looks like alice is now fully operational: and my fingers are adjusting to her keyboard rapidly. Fortunately, I am finding myself more often hitting fn+key in place of ctrl+key on dixie, then I am on alice. Whew.

I’ve installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and set it up to behave as dixie has been used all these years: a workstation rather than a terminal. I don’t have time to fiddle further with making OpenBSD play nice with Windows 7 on this rig. This does pretty much net me all that I desire: a bourne shell, decent terminal multiplexer, XMonad, Chrome, Pidgin, Dropbox, and a system tray area. I can live with the (ugh) GNU and Ubuntu parts.

The only real difference between the Desktop and Netbook editions of Ubuntu, the former comes with a customised GNOME where as the latter comes with a custom GNOME shell called “Unity“. I have really got to say that Unity SUCKS!!!!!! I seriously cannot fathom anyone getting real work done with Unity because you’ll have to set it up to do anything more useful than launch Mozilla, it feels so useless, that I think I would trade GNU/Linux for MS-DOS 2/3, and old DOS really, really did suck. Once I found the GNOME shortcut for the run dialog didn’t work, I decided instantly it would have to Go.

But to be fair, Unity does do some Very Good Things, and I commend the engineers behind it for breaking away from the Windows norm, that every GUI app tends to follow. The focus on full-screening the apps also is a feature that I like. The whole dock/sidebar thing is also quite nice, if kind of restrictive. Not even KDE4 offered as much nice “Wow, this looks integrated” kind of warm and fuzzies.

But I don’t want to take hours to try and restructure the thing, nor do I want to constantly grep programs by their menu pretty names, or have to push a button for just about every darn thing. OK, I still live in a command prompt 75% or more of the time, so sue me.